Gracious as a good gift given freely,
Comes from each campanile
At each corner of the wall,
The keen voice of a bell,
"Lan-up, lan-up," they ring,
And call and call the king
With the voice of the old spell
That they inherit from the hermit's bell—
Five times as strong,—
The king must go ere long—
He has the key to the garden gates,
He only waits
In courtesy to say the queen farewell.
Alas! Alas! The king is mad!
The people throng to see him pass,
And he has heard a mass.
All the world is convinced of his madness, especially lovers.
It was an eery thing to see
The king go merrily
And all the world forgo—
At dawn when little birds sing charmingly,
There was a ringing sound of horses' feet
And lovers in their upper rooms stopped clinging,
To hear go down the street
The minstrelsy
And little foolscap bells a-ringing.
IV.
Having heard a mass the king takes leave of this world's shore and the queen.
Down at the river ford
Beside the ferry,
Dances a little wherry,
To every wave that blows in from the sea
It dances merrily;
To every wave it dips it
And to the wind it tips it.
This merry little boat the king will take,
The pale queen waits with outstretched hands,
And now he bends above the oars,
And now before the garden gates he stands—
It was an eery thing to see
Him leave so merrily—
The music played him to the shore
Where he will walk no more.
The king is mad to be so lonely glad,
And mad to throw the key into the sea.
In the perfect harmony of his garden the king is married by the power of art and nature to the beauty of the earth.
And now he dwells within his hermitage of bells
Upon the cape shaped like a hunter's horn,
The five bells strike a unitone,
The wind comes fooling like an ape
And the strange boy-breasted sea things mourn.
The rock pools seep and creep,
Laugh like a mad child in a moonstruck sleep,
And then flow onward like an easy dream,
Talking among the rocks,
Into one valley stream,
That ticks and drips and strikes like distant clocks
Till with a snaky motion
It curves three times
And glides into the ocean.
Marry! The king now is a lover!
The bridegroom of his mother earth, no other,
It goes unholily that he should be
Enamored of the earth that gave him birth
And of the sea,
But now he has his will
And he is husband to the sea and hill
And to the wind a brother.
But the world still thinks the king mad.